Katie Grove: Camp Creators & Alumni Artisans Series
Camp Creators & Alumni Artisans Series
This article is part of a series on “Alumni Artisans,” celebrating the many creatives we have in our summer camp community. In it, we’ll be featuring visual artists, performers, and art teachers, all of whom have been staff or campers at Falling Creek. If you know of an artist in our alumni community who we should feature, please email us at .
In 2009 and 2010, Katie Grove was part of our Falling Creek staff team as a rock climbing instructor. Spending time exploring forests, harvesting art materials from nature, and enjoying the outdoors are all still favorite pastimes for her, and she’s since been able to turn these passions into a career. Katie is currently an artist and educator living in the Hudson Valley of New York, specializing in basket weaving.
For those campers and counselors who were also on the mountain in 2010, it’s hard to imagine that it was over a decade ago. “I can’t believe so much time has passed!” said Katie. “It’s been a roller coaster full of traveling, making art, and developing a career as a basketry teacher. More recently, I went to grad school to study interdisciplinary art and have been continuing to deepen my connection to the land I call home south of the Catskills in New York State.” Katie has a background in Fibers Art from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a BFA in Printmaking from SUNY New Paltz.
Though she taught rock climbing at Falling Creek, Katie was already getting started in basket weaving back in her camp counselor days. “I wove my first baskets during my undergrad in art school in Philadelphia during a fiber arts class and it was love at first sight,” she said. “I felt like I’d found my calling; basket weaving perfectly merges my love for nature and my love for making things. While making those first baskets I kept going back to memories that I have from being a child when I would be out in my backyard trying to tie grasses together and make things. I believe that it was meant to be and I’m grateful that my path in life led me back to it as an adult.”
Katie’s passion for being outside is part of why she finds so much enjoyment in collecting her art materials from the landscape surrounding her home. “Everything that I work with is a natural material that I forage from the land. I have many relationships with local landowners who invite me to come and harvest trees, leaves, roots, bark, and much more, that I then turn into baskets or sculptures, or use to teach classes.” She works on her art either in her studio, or on the lawn at a picnic table when the weather permits!
Katie guides art workshops for both children and adults, and is currently leading a “Wild Basketry Workshop Series” this year. In her classes, students learn twining, plaiting, coiling, ribbed basketry, twined bags, cordage, and other basketry techniques, while working with a wide variety of natural materials. She teaches how to identify, find, harvest, prepare, and process local plants for weaving, including grapevines, honeysuckle, wisteria, tree bark, cattails, grasses, iris leaves, dogbane, nettle, basswood fiber, and more, depending on availability. What sets Katie’s classes apart is that she doesn’t just teach the skill, but she explores what it means to turn locally gathered plants into a functional piece of art. As she says, we “walk in the footsteps of our ancestors and harvest gratefully from the earth to make one of the most culturally meaningful objects in history: the basket.”
The piece Katie made that she is most proud of is actually a one-person boat, known as a coracle, or a ‘cwrwgl’ as it was originally named in Welsh. “Last summer I embarked on a quest to make a coracle, using a woven willow frame with a cowhide stretched over it,” she said. The use of coracles goes back 2000 years, pre-dating Roman times. An article on the history of the coracle by “Visit Wales” says that “the pattern created by the willow weaving correlates to the river it was built by, giving each boat a marker of its origin.” For Katie, this project was very personal. “First of all, it is the biggest basket I’ve ever made, and it was meaningful that the thing it is meant to hold is a person. It has even deeper meaning for me because this is a boat that my ancestors in Wales would have been making for hundreds of years. Completing the coracle and sailing it around the ponds and rivers where I live has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life!”
For any campers reading this and thinking about starting basket weaving themselves, Katie’s advice is to just go for it! “Start picking up materials and playing with them. Spend a lot of time outside sitting in nature, developing a relationship with the plants growing all around you,” she said. “A lot of my students are afraid of ‘doing it wrong’, but doing it wrong and learning from that is the best way to really develop a hands-on sense of what works and what doesn’t. I’m primarily self taught so this has been my main approach, but there are also books, teachers and craft schools, and online resources. As for making art a career- don’t be afraid to follow your passion and forge your own path. There is no rulebook on how to make a career in art, which can make it both exciting and scary. There are so many different ways to make it work, but it’s most important to not let go of your dreams and to figure out a way to share your gifts with the world.”
Though it’s been years since her time at boys camp, Katie still uses the skills she learned as a counselor. “Many of the lessons about working with kids that I learned in camp I still use today, whether working with kids or adults. One of the biggest ones is to meet people where they are at and to be compassionate and open hearted.”
Katie continues to work hard at developing her craft and teaching the techniques she’s learned to others. “I have a big secret project that I am not ready to share quite yet, but that I’m super excited about and have been spending tons of time on. More on that soon,” she says. “I’ve also been working on cultivating a willow garden for weaving material, creating living willow sculptures, and making tons of baskets, as always!”
You can reach out to Katie at with questions or interest in 2024 classes. You can visit her website, katiegrovestudios.com, to keep up with her latest work, read her basketry blog, or join her mailing list.